The Genre of Gothic Fiction

Course Code: SUM2503

Start Date: 22/07/2025

Tuesday

Session: Morning

Delivery method: Centre Only

Length in weeks: 1

Time: 10am - 12pm

Price: £

This two-hour session will explore the genre of gothic fiction, its origins in the eighteenth century novel by Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764), its parodic treatment in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) and its subsequent link to the emergence of psychoanalytic concepts, most notably Freud’s ‘the uncanny’. Its link to women writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will be explored with reference to extracts from novels, such as Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) , Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009) and Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016).